Dagwood watched the boy he thought he loved slowly walk out of his hotel room, and then he buried his face in his hands and tried to figure out where he had gone wrong in his endeavors. It felt as if his heart was being torn into shreds with each fading footstep, and then when he couldn’t hear anything at all, it felt as if he had died. Everything inside him went numb. He couldn’t feel his own breathing through the haze of disbelief inside his mind.

Somewhere along the line, he had indeed gone wrong. He had no idea when this happened, only that it had. He thought he might have been managing to convince Irwin that he was telling the truth and it certainly seemed as if he’d succeeded, but now Irwin was gone anyway, and it was all for nothing. He’d been too hopeful, too presumptuous. After all, he was the one who’d had 10 years to think over the person he saw in the well, to fall in love with the idea of their very existence.

But Irwin wasn’t a fool. Even if he believed in what he’d been told, he’d decided that it was too much for him, and he’d jumped ship like any sane person would. Dagwood shouldn’t have expected any different. Sure, he’d imagined this exact scenario a thousand different ways, plotting out all the different outcomes, but Irwin was a real person and not a product of his eager imagination. Irwin had his own mind, he’d used it, and he was gone forever now.

A man like Dagwood didn’t get anywhere in life just sitting and thinking. He’d been named Dagwood, for fuck’s sake. He acted, which was how he had come to be the type of person he was. He needed to get up, to forget Irwin, to find someone else to have sex with like he’d been planning to last night so that he could ride a wave of pleasure instead of stress for once.

But even as he thought that, he couldn’t make himself move. He was grieving over the loss of a person he’d never known, who had never been his to begin with.

He had neglected to tell Irwin that at the time he discovered the forest and the well, he’d been hot on the tracks of a felon who’d skipped out on his court date. That was his job, to catch such people, and one could say that he enjoyed the rewards that came with it. That wasn’t to suggest he had a boner for risk-taking, but it did his heart good to see someone brought back into the system so justice could be served in one way or another. Whether the accuser or the accused was right, that never mattered to him. It wasn’t his business. What was his business was making sure that decision could be made at all.

When he came across the forest, he naturally assumed that his perp had ducked inside to cover his tracks. Looking back at this occurrence so often throughout the years, Dagwood finally admitted to himself that he hadn’t actually had a reason to go into the forest. The perp could be in there, but they also might not be. What drove him to go inside was a simple, uncontrollable need he couldn’t explain, and so he had ignored his own better judgment in favor of his baser instincts.

The forest had been incredibly dark, composed mainly of thick pine trees which blocked out the sun. Everything looked the same no matter where he looked, without any signs at all that any other humans or animals had come this way. The only scents belonged to that of the earth and the air and the plants, as if this place existed in some alternate plane of reality where intelligent life hadn’t yet developed. Everything seemed sharper, clearer. His powerful senses roamed without inhibition, without restraint. He was completely and utterly free.

He hadn’t told Irwin about that, either. It wouldn’t have made any sense. He hadn’t been lost. Somehow, he’d known where he was going all along without even realizing it, like he really was on the trail of something.

A clearing had opened up around him and he stumbled into it, feeling weak sunlight chase away some of the forestry chill. Soft grass replaced the undergrowth and there in the middle of it all had been the well, looking older than the very concept of time. The bricks were cracked and the entire structure leaned dangerously to one side, made top-heavy by the fact that its wooden roof was infested with draperies of moss and vine.

Gripping the top of the wall which surrounded the wishing well, Dagwood had felt his fingers slip into grooves created by the countless others before him who had stood there and done the same thing. He looked down, further down than he would have thought. The water was dark and still, but glistened as a cloud above shifted and a shaft of sunlight fell perfectly down the vertical tunnel to land on the surface. Except, it wasn’t the sky causing the light. The well made its own light, glistening and twinkling like all the stars in the sky. While at first immobile on the water, suddenly they were changing colors and shifting position.

In the back of his mind, he thought he might be seeing his own reflection, then another cloud had moved so he could finally see himself, but that just wasn’t the case. The water was moving on its own and the reflection forming in the water belonged to someone else.

The person he saw had red hair. True red hair, so vibrant that it was orange. The style was a bit too short for his tastes, shorn in the back and slightly longer in the front, but the owner of the hair was simply so adorable that he fell in love on sight. His neck was long and his face was thin, his features gangly, as if he hadn’t grown into his own skin just yet. The barest tinge of red fuzz on his throat gave contrast to skin white as porcelain.

But it was his eyes.

They were blue. They were ice, peering out from beneath a mussed tangle of flame. Never before had he seen blue eyes and red hair on any person, and the combination struck him as downright magical. Since then, he learned that there was nothing magical about simple genetics, but it was too late to rid his mind of that impression. As far as he was concerned, he was the most down to earth and responsible person he knew…and he believed in magic.

The image of Irwin in the well transformed slowly into that of a pretty little red wolf unlike anything he’d known existed at that time. Then, the waters went dark. The show was over. Somehow, Dagwood had stumbled out of the forest with no sense of how much time had been lost. He completed the rest of that assignment in a daze, then took a vacation to try and deal with what he’d seen.

He’d been dealing with it ever since, with varying degrees of success. At first, he kept an eye out for the man in the well but as the days turned to months, then years, hope turned to despair and finally acceptance.

Now he was right back where he started, more or less, dealing with the transition from hope to despair.

“I ruined it,” he whispered.

As if in answer, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was a very weak buzz even though he’d turned the intensity up all the way. Something about shapeshifting seemed to render electronics worthless over a very short period of time. The result was maddening. Cell phones died. Car batteries drained. Computers malfunctioned. Even lights and elevators were occasionally prone to shutting off if a particularly strong shifter was in the area, and the wiring of the affected electric device wasn’t the best. No one could really explain it, so far as Dagwood knew, but it was damn inconvenient. He went through cells like customers went through flapjacks at a diner. This was his fourth this year, and it was on the verge of dying entirely.

Sighing as he answered the phone, Dagwood tucked the slim device between his shoulder and cheek. “King,” he said shortly, rummaging around in the nightstand for a pen and a notepad.

“Woody, you in Virginia yet?”

Dagwood rolled his eyes at the pet name his current boss had given him. “Got here last night, actually, Mr. Briggs. I’m in Portsmouth.”

“Notification would have been an appropriate course of action,” Mr. Briggs said. He spoke with the clipped, managerial tone of a man who was used to getting his way. Dagwood had no doubt that was the truth. People involved in the legal system were often at a risk from the very people for whom they provided a service, and that required a specific type of bravado to tolerate. Bail bondsmen were no exception, it seemed. Collecting money from criminals who should really be in jail was no light task.

Mr. Briggs continued. “In fact, it should have been the only course of action to take. For all I know, you could have died on the way there.”

Dagwood scratched a message to himself on the hotel notepad, a reminder to buy a new phone and transfer all his information over before this one died. Last time that happened, it had been inconvenient, to say the least. “Mr. Briggs, you might want to consult with your secretary. I did in fact call your office last night, but she said you were out. She took a message.”

A pause. “Secretary? That’s my wife.”

“She called herself your secretary.”

What the hell is the point of this conversation?

The man on the other end of the line let out a despairing groan. In his short time having spoken with the man in person, Dagwood could imagine what he was doing as he groaned: pinching the bridge of his nose to stave away a headache, he would roll his eyes skyward and then shake his head. As a matter of fact, Mr. Briggs had performed this action three times in only fifteen minutes last time they spoke.

“It’s an in-joke between us.” Mr. Briggs added a sigh to the end of his display of exasperated gestures. “In any case, you’re right. I should have asked her. Do you have any leads?”

“Not yet,” Dagwood replied. He fiddled with the pen, methodically taking it apart. “I haven’t actually had any time to begin my hunt. There was some trouble last night.”

“Oh? What sort of trouble? Am I going to have to pay you extra for this?”

A lesser man might have been tempted by that offer, but Dagwood wasn’t a lesser man. As it was, he felt he was already being paid too much. “Not trouble for me. Some kid got in trouble with a group of lions. I had to make sure he was okay.”

“Ah. Well. Is he?”

“Yes.”

A momentary silence fell, neither of them knowing what to say. No doubt Mr. Briggs was searching for the right words to form some kind of grateful sentiment, while Dagwood really just wanted this to be over with. Dealing with humans was awkward enough without them being aware of the existence of shifters. Dragging them into the mix just made things way too complicated.

Unfortunately, it was also usually necessary in some way or another. Things used to be much simpler, back in the days before social security numbers and all other forms of government regulation. Dagwood supposed that was the reason he liked wild west fiction so much, because the allure of the untamed wilderness where anything could happen spoke to the wolf in him. These days, the world didn’t belong to shifters. It belonged to humans, catered to their needs.

The needs of shifters, such as specialized hospitals and medicines and organizations, couldn’t simply be organized by shifters alone. Select humans in power had to be involved, to control the flow of information in or out. Without that extra bit of checks and balances, the world might very well descend into chaos.

What was a nurse going to do when faced with a patient with wounds that healed themselves, unless she had been chosen specifically for her knowledge of what she was facing?

What would the police do when a shifter became a murderer? Ordinary men and women couldn’t have their lives put at risk like that. They had to be swapped out for those in the know, who would be better equipped to deal with men who could turn into bears, or tigers, or moose.

It was a precarious balancing act that really didn’t work all that well. Dagwood knew that, because he was part of it. Mr. Briggs wasn’t a shifter, but he knew of them. He chose Dagwood for this job because he was part of a small circle who knew which bounty hunters weren’t entirely human, to go up against a wanted man who also wasn’t entirely human.

As the awkward silence droned on, Dagwood quickly ran out of patience. “So,” he said. “I’m here. In Portsmouth. Following his trail. I’ll be getting a bit of a late start because of all that trouble last night, and I’d like to get to it. You understand.”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Briggs agreed. “Of course. Please notify me if something changes.”

“And you do the same for me,” Dagwood replied.

Just as he hung up, it occurred to him that a better course of action might be to just call this off. This situation struck him as a conflict of interest, to be working in the same city as the boy he’d been daydreaming about for a decade. There were lives potentially at stake, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted by anything. Besides, he’d been following this bastard all the way from Nebraska. Several of the leads on the ongoing investigation had been because of him. He’d earned his pay. He could quit, even if it meant giving up his share of the award at the end of the hunt.

He could quit.

He just wasn’t going to.

Sighing, Dagwood got up and went into the shower and turned it on full-blast, as cold as it could get. The spray of water on his skin was like needles of ice, piercing him again and again. He could barely breathe and hurried through it, emerging much more awake than before. Another lie he’d told Irwin was that he’d slept in the chair.

No, he hadn’t slept. How could a person sleep when they were looking at a dream come to life?

Dressing again, he allowed himself one more moment of sorrow before turning back to the task at hand. When he brushed his teeth, he didn’t count out two minutes as he usually did, but instead ran through everything he knew about the bastard he was following.

The perp’s name was Kevin Leery. He was a 25-year-old jobless young man who was suspected of the murders of two people in his hometown in Nebraska. He had no alibi, and all signs pointed to his involvement, but the court case was expected to be one of the longest and most difficult legal battles in the history of Nebraska. This was because his parents were influential people in their community. Not exactly wealthy, but definitely socialites.

The only problem was Kevin never showed up to his court date. His parents paid his bail months prior so that he could spend the time in relative luxury, and then he simply never arrived at court. That was two weeks ago. Where he had gone, when he had gone, no one knew.

Dagwood was only one of dozens of bounty hunters, PIs, and detectives on the case. The entire country was enthralled in the story. Kevin’s face was everywhere. The sightings of him were out of control, nearly impossible to comb through.

But nevertheless, Dagwood had combed through the reports, untangled the knots, and now he was here in Portsmouth where the most recent sighting of Kevin had been. That was only two days ago. He was hot on the trail, gaining speed. If he moved quickly enough, this would be it.

That was, if he could move quickly enough. He was tired and disheartened, and he was old for a bounty hunter. Retirement loomed in the near future.

By the time he finished getting dressed, there was no trace at all on the outside of how broken he felt. All that was tucked away on the inside. Outwardly, he projected calmness and peace. In the past, perps had given themselves up to him after just a friendly chat.

I don’t think that’s going to be the case this time.

Dagwood gathered up his briefcase, with all his files on the case, and made sure his gun holster wasn’t visible beneath the hem of his polo shirt. He had a license for concealed carry but he’d be damned if he could remember Virginia’s exact laws on the topic. The last thing he needed was a run-in with the police, especially since they were only tolerant of civil justice workers on the best of days.

When he stepped out into the hallway, he was glad that Irwin’s scent hadn’t lingered. Some maid must have gone by while he was in the shower, and now the smell of laundry detergent reigned supreme over everything else.

Outside, the sun didn’t seem to have gotten the message that summer was ending. He felt hot and stifled in less than a minute, his skin protesting against the humidity in the air.

Why can’t these delinquents ever go somewhere nice? Like Alaska. Somewhere with mountains.

He moved off, leaving the hotel behind. Soon enough he was lost in the depths of the little city, nosing his way through back alleys and skeevy shortcuts. Rats kept him company, pacing at his feet without fear in hopes of a scrap or two. Pigeons swarmed in his direction whenever he emerged out onto the street, their feathers slicked down and eyes overbright from the heat. They would examine him, peck at his shoelaces, before leaving him behind in favor of a new target.

The attention of the animals never bothered him, even when he had to slow down to avoid stepping on them. The world needed more innocent curiosity like this, as far as he was concerned.

But, for the most part, he was left alone to his wandering. Portsmouth was no different from any other city in the regard that it was filled with people all going their own way, aiming to get there as fast as possible. Friendliness was low. Everyone simply kept to themselves, heads down, eyes averted, hands busy even when their bodies were idle.

Dagwood fingered the photograph he kept in his pocket, crumpled now from constant folding, but he didn’t bring it out to ask any of the questions brewing inside him. The general population wouldn’t have an answer for him anyway. For that, he would have to count on measures a little bit differently.

For a long time he saw neither hide nor hair of an opportunity. The surroundings blurred around him, everything becoming the same. Gray streets, silver buildings, a sky full of glare. Ripples of distortion wavered up from the concrete. Soon enough, the combination of bright lights and tricky sights left him with a headache forming behind his eyes.

Then, the crowd on the sidewalk seemed to separate for just a moment and he saw a woman sitting on the ground beside a set of stairs that led up to a bank. She wore layer upon layer of old, ragged clothes. Sweat glistened on her forehead and her hands were wet and slick where they emerged from the ends of unraveling sweater sleeves. Her face was dirty and her eyes were sad, but somehow serene. Pigeons flocked around her as people avoided her, their eyes flicking past her position as if she didn’t exist.

Dagwood slowed his pace and moved to the other side of the street, watching her. She seemed to have no inclination to stand up or get moving anytime soon, especially considering that she had a grocery cart parked behind her in the shadows. This was her camp for the day, at least until someone reported her presence to the bank tellers and a security guard came out to chase her away.

At the next gas station, Dagwood went inside and purchased a sandwich and two cups of crushed ice. He broke a $50 to do it, which seemed to majorly piss off the pimpled, teenage clerk. The tip he left in the jar on the cash register counter seemed to do nothing to stave off some of that rage.

Dagwood circled back around to the other side of the street, purchases in hand. The ice in the cups glistened, plastic already wet with condensation. His lips felt suddenly parched and his tongue cried out for the cool, sweet touch of water, but he refrained. This wasn’t for him.

The woman was still at her perch near the steps. Her age was difficult to judge, even for someone with the trained eye of a predator and professional hunter. His best guess was anywhere between 25 and 50.

She didn’t look up as he approached, staring resolutely down at her hands. They were gnarled and twisted but that didn’t seem to bother her. Knitting needles danced between her fingers, forming endless expert loops as the pointed tips clicked and slid together. If he hung around for a bit, he would get to see the formation of a scarf from start to finish.

But that wasn’t why he was here.

“Hi,” he said.

The woman gestured with one oversized needle at a Styrofoam coffee cup about a foot away from her knee. “Spare some change, sir?” This request had all the shame of someone asking the time, which was to say there was no shame at all.

She must have been at this game for a while.

He supposed a person could adjust to anything. At this point in her life, the routine of begging and rejection was no different to her than a person who got up early and went to work for nine hours a day. It was written all over her face, that she had grown used to being cast aside in the gutter.

The knitting was unique, though. Even when she spoke, when she pointed with her needle, her rhythm never ceased.

Dagwood leaned over to look into her cup. Sure enough, it was a little fuller than average, brimming with quarters and small change. A musical instrument would get her more, but not everyone had that talent. He damn sure didn’t.

“How about something more than a quarter?” he asked. He held out a $10 and showed it to her, then folded it up so it would fit in her cup.

Finally, her knitting faltered. Her eyes lost some of their haze and filled with suspicion. “What do you want in return, sir? Because the answer is no. You can keep your whore money for someone else.”

He let this response slide, having heard it dozens of times before. “I don’t want sex. I just want to ask you a question. If you answer it, you can have this.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you can still have the money, but you’ll never know what I was going to ask.”

Sure enough, she looked curious. “What’s the question?”

“Have you seen this man?”

Dagwood retrieved the photograph of Kevin Leery from his pocket and showed it to her. She peered at the picture, nose almost touching the shiny surface. He never used mug shots for things like this. People took one look at those, assumed he was a cop, and shut right up. This picture was normal enough, about six months old. Kevin stood next to a brand-new motorcycle, all his features on display—light brown hair, a curly beard, and pale eyes the color of clay. Essentially, he was a person who didn’t stand out much.

The woman finally leaned back a little. Though she didn’t look away from the photograph, her hands resumed their knitting. “That’s the boy who been on the news lately. I watch the televisions in the window of the Radio Shack sometimes, that’s how I know.”

“Radio Shack is a nice place.”

She laughed, the sound dry and rough. “They don’t care if I sleep in the back by the dumpster as long as I’m gone by the time the customers come in the morning.”

“Have you seen this man anywhere else except on the news?”

“Can’t say I have, sir.” She shrugged. “Sorry about that. I mostly keep to myself.”

“No, don’t be sorry. If you do see him, here.” Dagwood dropped his business card in her change cup followed by a few quarters for a pay phone. They were rare these days but you could usually find one in the back corner of older gas stations.

He also gave her the $10, as promised, half the sandwich, and a cup of ice. She thanked him dutifully and tonelessly, with no more enthusiasm than if he’d only given her a penny. He didn’t mind. There were more and less generous people in the world than him. She’d probably seen it all.

The next person he spoke to was a newly-homeless girl of around 18 years old, who happily offered everything she had to give in exchange for the food and ice. Naturally, he rejected all these offers and then thanked her even though she wasn’t able to help him at all.

Leaving her behind to her newfound fortune, he went in search of a different area of the city, though he had no idea which direction he wanted to go. The homeless saw as much as they were not seen, and if two different individuals could offer nothing then he was in the wrong spot. However, he’d always had luck with this tactic, and he wasn’t about to give up on it after only a few disappointments.

If I was Kevin…

He knew quite a lot about Kevin. It was all in the files in his briefcase. Hell, he even knew who Kevin lost his virginity to, because the police interviewed his first girlfriend. The guy seemed okay, though a bit too rough around the edges. It was that roughness which had allowed him to escape detection for so long, since he wasn’t confined to the measures that fussier people would take.

Knowing all that, if he was Kevin, he wouldn’t stick to the main streets where all the people were. He’d be in the dark, in the slums, waiting out the cover of darkness. He might not even be in Portsmouth anymore, but he had to have left a trail somewhere.

Dagwood looked around him, then spotted an alleyway where several doors and windows were boarded up. He headed in that direction, knowing from experience that the city’s natural decay would lead him to those broken places hidden just out of sight.

Passing through the alley, he found himself on a street with significantly fewer people. The shops were dingier, the towers in need of a polishing. Satisfied that he was getting closer, he moved deeper down the street; before he had gone even ten feet, a soft sound came from behind him.

Someone muttered, “Fuck.”

The voice cut through the background din of the city, sending chills racing up his spine. Spinning around, Dagwood felt his heart stop when he saw who was standing there so close by.

Irwin knelt in the middle of the sidewalk on his hands and knees, fumbling for papers that shifted and rustled around him in the faint, scorching wind. A faint tint of pink colored his pale skin, the first sign of a developing sunburn. His hair looked damp and frizzy, and when he looked up the sunlight caught in his eyes and made them glitter.

Standing there, Dagwood could only watch. His heart thundered wildly in his chest and his pulse pounded in his eardrums. A new layer of sweat dampened his skin, sticking his shirt to his back.

I’m in the middle of working. I can’t…

A paper blew free from the rest, rolling over and over in his direction. Instinctively, he bent and snagged it.

“Thanks,” Irwin said, lifting his head. “I…Oh.” The papers he gathered up went scattering away again as he dropped them for the second time in as many minutes.

Despite himself, Dagwood laughed.

Irwin glared at him before resuming his wild chase, trying to get the papers again as the wind threatened to pick up once more. “If you’re going to stalk me, you could at least make yourself useful!”

Between the two of them, they managed to catch all the papers. Dagwood tried not to notice the contents of the jumbled stack but he was too used to having to notice everything, and this detail couldn’t escape his attention. These were job applications. Quite a few, from the feel of it.

The papers were torn from his grip. Irwin held them all against his chest, still glaring. His eyes were icier than ever, and Dagwood could feel his body beginning to respond to that stare. He shifted, trying to discourage the inevitable.

“Why are you following me?” Irwin demanded. His teeth changed to fangs and back again while he spoke, slurring some of the words.

Holding up his hands, Dagwood said, “Hold on. I’m not following you. But since I’ve run into you again, how about lunch?”

Irwin just kept staring.

The suggestion had come out before he could even think to stop it, before he could rework the words into something more appropriate for this situation. But he had spoken, the words were out, and now he had to try to get out of the hole he’d just dug himself. “It was about 8 a.m. when we parted ways. It’s 11:35 now, which means it’s time for lunch. Judging by the fact that your hair is still wet despite the heat, you haven’t showered all that long ago, and you’ve been inside more than outside. My guess is you haven’t eaten though, because of the amount of applications here. Which is commendable, by the way. Not many people would go through what you did and then get right back on the horse.”

Irwin said nothing. Then, “You’re really fucking weird, Dogwood.”

“Dagwood.”

“I know.” Irwin rubbed his forehead. “And none of that was even any of your business.”

“So, I was right.”

“Yeah, you were right. Happy?”

“I’ve been happier,” Dagwood muttered under his breath. “Look, if you don’t eat, you’ll pass out. It’s way too damn hot out here.”

“Maybe on Planet Perfect where you live, people actually feel like eating. Not me.”

“It doesn’t matter what you feel like. You need to do it anyway. I’ll buy you lunch.”

Irwin rolled his eyes and then shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, but no. You really seem like a nice guy, and I’m glad you helped me out, but I think this is where I draw the line. I don’t know you. You’re weird. And I have shit to do.”

And that was that. He had his answer, and it was no. There was no reason for him to linger, to protest, when he’d been shot down so thoroughly. Opening his mouth, he meant to say something along the lines of, “Sure, I’ll respect your boundaries. I have a suspected murderer to catch anyway. Let’s let this be just a funny memory.”

But what he actually said was, “Maybe someone in your position shouldn’t be resisting the offer of free food. Half an hour. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Half an hour? I don’t know what you think you’re gonna get done in half an hour, but it won’t be much.”

Dagwood looked away, feeling a strange ache deep inside his soul. “I’ve been waiting to meet you for 10 years. Half an hour talking to you, sharing a meal with you, is more than I ever expected to get.”

Irwin shifted his weight from one foot to the other, eyebrows drawing together with confusion and wariness. “That’s a little weird.”

“Is that a no, then, Irwin?”

Irwin hesitated. The world seemed to be hanging in balance, poised on the top of a needle. Dagwood could only hold his breath, waiting to see the outcome of this incredibly important decision. They were at a crossroads here and he very badly wanted to head down one path in particular, but if it was blocked off to him there was nothing he could do but accept it. And he would accept it this time. No was no. He’d been denied once and expected to live with that choice. This time, he actually would.

“Okay.”

His head snapped up. All the air in the world was nowhere to be found. His lungs were a vacuum. His throat was a desert.

Irwin looked tentative, but as Dagwood didn’t respond, his expression became annoyed. “Hello? I said okay. You’ve got five seconds to buy me food or else I’m gone.”

Dagwood jumped, twisting around and jabbing his finger in the direction of a random restaurant. “There!” he said, breathless, like a teenager deciding what to do on his first date. “Let’s go there. Come on!”

He went to grab Irwin’s hand, only to encounter empty air as the omega wolf yanked away from him. At the same exact time he realized what he was doing and tried to stop, but it was too late. Rather than bringing them together, he’d only reinforced the distance.

Rubbing the back of his neck, he muttered, “Sorry. You still coming?”

Irwin peered mistrustingly at him from beneath those fiery, tangled bangs. “Yeah. Just for the food, though.”

The restaurant he pointed at turned out to be a pizzeria, which was absolutely not authentic at all. Dagwood usually considered himself more of a real Italian food kind of guy, but the lean, hungry edge to Irwin’s expression was infectious; he realized that he, too, was starving.

An apathetic waitress seated them at a filthy booth, snapping her gum the entire way. “What you want to drink?”

As it turned out, it didn’t matter what they wanted to drink because nothing they asked for was available. In the end, their drink order amounted to a glass of water and some knock-off lemon-lime soda which came in a dusty bottle.

“I hate that I like it,” Irwin said after taking a sip.

Dagwood couldn’t help it. He smiled like an idiot. The motion of Irwin’s lips on the rim of the bottle was mesmerizing, and he couldn’t look away. His arousal from earlier hadn’t faded, and now he was almost entirely erect, his shaft pressing uncomfortably against the inner seam of his jeans.

The waitress returned and just stood there with her notepad in hand, expecting them to order without prompting.

Dagwood hadn’t even been looking at the menu. “Uh,” he said, glancing at it. Anonymous stains covered most of the words.

Irwin spoke up first. “I’ll have a medium anchovy pizza.”

Did he say anchovies?

Never in Dagwood’s entire life had he actually met another person who ate anchovies, much less liked them on pizza. It was such a stupid thing to get excited about and yet he couldn’t stop the warm thrill of hope that went through his body.

“I’ll have the same,” he managed to say.

The waitress wandered off, leaving them with their stained and sticky menus. Irwin poked at a piece of gum stuck to the corner of his. “What do you think this is? Spearmint?”

Dagwood took a look, though not even his investigative skills could have possibly yielded an answer to this question. The gum was so old as to have become a petrified lump of gray material. “Maybe,” he offered. “You like anchovies?”

“Do you think that waitress put this here?” Irwin asked, still inspecting the piece of gum. “I think I can see teeth marks in it. Should we get a comparison? Like, dental…I want to say foreskin but that’s not right.”

“Forensics?”

“Right. That. Do you think she’d go for it?”

“No.”

“Not even if we tipped her?”

Laughing softly, Dagwood shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s paid enough to put up with that kind of stuff. We’d probably get kicked out.”

“Because this is such a fancy, reputable restaurant.” Irwin finally laughed, and the sound was angelic to Dagwood. “The table isn’t even clean.” To prove his point, he trailed one slender finger through a patch of crumbs.

Point taken.

If he took his attention away from Irwin for a moment, he found himself noticing all the flaws about this place that he had been blind to. None of the tables were clean and the floor was slick with days of grease-splatter. Crumbs, entire crusts, petrified toppings, and napkins had all been swept up out of the way against the wall and left there. None of the other patrons seemed to notice the destitute state of the place, nursing their pizza or overcooked noodles with their eyes downcast.

This place wasn’t deserving of their time, wasn’t deserving of Irwin’s presence. If he had noticed all this first, he wouldn’t have let them get this far inside.

There was nothing to be done for it now, though. They were here, in the middle of the filth, and now their pizzas were being set down on their table. The server was utterly silent for the entire process, leaving again without a word.

The silence remained as Dagwood studied his pizza, and Irwin tucked into his. As was expected, the quality was low. Parts of the pizzas were alternatively overcooked and underdone, and the cheese had melted in that plastic-y sort of way that signaled it was more filler than actual dairy. Just looking at it was giving him heartburn. Not even the fact that the anchovies seemed to be of a comparatively average quality could save it.

Irwin ate without care, hardly seeming to taste what he put in his mouth. If he was chewing, it was only briefly between deep, ragged swallows. A slice disappeared, then two more, and he continued on with a fourth with no sign that he would slow down anytime soon.

Picking up his first slice, Dagwood forced himself to take a bite. There was a universal truth in this weird world, that even terrible pizza was pretty damn good. Grease assailed his senses, filled his mouth from a seemingly endless source as he ate. “I’m going to regret this later,” he muttered.

Irwin paused, a dribble of sauce leaking from the corner of his mouth. He swiped at it impatiently, leaving a smear of red. The urge to take care of the rest, either with his tongue or a napkin, nearly overcame Dagwood. His hand rose up of its own accord, and he hurried to redirect it towards his water glass, pretending to take a sip.

Irwin didn’t even seem to notice the awkward movement. He finished chewing and swallowed, throat bobbing. “Why?” he asked.

Dagwood’s hand trembled as he set his glass back down, and he grabbed up his pizza again in the hopes of disguising it. “Why…what?”

“Why are you going to regret it?”

“Because I’m old?”

Irwin narrowed his eyes. Only two pieces of his pizza remained, and he picked up one, plucking at the plump body of a little fish before popping it in his mouth. Miniscule bones popped between his teeth. “You’re weird, but you aren’t that old. Up there, but not like, elderly.”

He found this to be more of a relief than it should have been. “Just, heartburn.”

“I’ve never had it.”

“Just wait until you hit 30. You’ll know it when you feel it.”

Irwin seemed to consider this before steering the conversation off in another direction. “Why are you even here in town, Dogwood?”

Nothing could have been more pathetic than the fact that he was starting to like that nickname. “I’m on business.”

“Doing?”

The truthful answer jumped to the tip of his tongue, and he only just managed to bite it back. As much as he would have liked to tell Irwin everything, he still had to be careful.. “Interviews, mostly.”

“So, you’re like a reporter?”

“I do find people to talk to, yes.”

His heart pounded in his chest at the bald-faced lie. Every syllable seemed more transparent than the last, like he was pointing to a window and calling it a brick wall. However, Irwin just shrugged and accepted everything. “That sounds boring.”

Dagwood thought back on how many hours a night he spent going through files, building his own, tracing and retracing old conversations for just one more hint. “It can be. There’s a lot of paperwork involved.”

“Well, at least you have a job,” Irwin grunted. Bitterness tinged his voice. His eating faltered and then resumed, but now it had become mechanical.

“That’s right. You got fired, you said. Why, if you don’t mind me asking? What did you do?”

“Hey, man, I didn’t do anything this time!”

Dagwood held up his hands, a little alarmed at all the fire coming his way. “I meant for work. What did you do for work?” He chose not to ask what the other man meant by “this time.”

“Oh.” Irwin relaxed, slumping back in his chair again. His shoulders slouched forward with something very much like despair. “Sorry. I just try to keep my nose clean. Keep work and play separate, you know?”

Which meant that he didn’t necessarily keep out of trouble in other parts of his life. Interesting.

“Anyway, I worked at a movie theater. It kind of sucked, but it was money at least.”

“Are you going to college?” Dagwood asked, curious. The more he could find out about the wolf he’d seen in the well, the better. Irwin’s pizza had long since been reduced to a few droplets of oil and burnt scraps of cheese. If he was done, their conversation was winding down to an inevitable end. He’d been lucky enough to run into Irwin twice, but pushing his luck for a third time seemed very unlikely.

“Couldn’t afford it. Figured why bother?” Irwin scowled. “You going to lecture me about that, Dogwood?”

“That’d be real hypocritical of me,” Dagwood said. “Since I didn’t go to college either.”

Irwin stared at him. “Huh?”

“I was born in the late 70’s,” Dagwood replied.

“Great. So? That’s like basic math.”

“What I’m saying is that my childhood was damn different from yours. We were raised to think that we could do anything we put our minds to, so then we went out and did it. I got my first job in the mid-90’s. No education required. Just a training course, and I was good to go. I thought I was ready, so they assumed I was ready.”

“And?” Irwin actually looked interested. “Were you?”

“Fuck no.” Dagwood laughed a little. “I was in a karate class as a kid, I told you. So when I got a bit older, I was invited to hang around the dojo to help assist with other classes. I got $5 a day. I thought I was rich. But god, dealing with kids is hard, and it never gets any easier the older you get.”

Irwin snatched a piece of cooling pizza from Dagwood’s pan. He pretended not to notice. “So by the time my generation started settling down with kids, starting families, we realized we’d had no fucking idea what we were doing and we unanimously set out to make it harder for the next generation to get jobs.”

Irwin snorted.

“That’s why the workplace is such a damn tangle these days. Experience needed for everything, college degrees required, recommended everywhere. We don’t want you to make the same bullshit mistakes we did.”

“So, you’re saying you had it easier.”

“God, yes, we did.”

“And in less than two minutes, I’ve learned way more about the economy than I ever did in high school.” Irwin chewed thoughtfully. “Interesting. Maybe I need to talk to old geezers more often.” His eyes flashed playfully, lessening the sting of his words. Dagwood didn’t mind much one way or the other since he already knew that Irwin didn’t necessarily consider him old.

“It’s a funny thing,” Dagwood said. “We’ve always tried to categorize everything, to make sense of everything that happens, but sometimes you just can’t. Sometimes we make a decision and it just goes right or wrong and there’s no amount of reasoning in the world that could explain the outcome. Stuff just…happens.”

“Do you think meeting me is just something that happened?”

He didn’t answer, because he knew what he might say was too heavy even for the intelligent young man sitting in front of him. He wanted to say no, not at all. He wanted to say that he had memorized every nuance of Irwin’s face since that day, that he had learned how to draw over the course of dozens of painstaking tutorials just so he could make sure he had the other man committed to memory. He wanted to say that he had fallen in love, to share all the things he ever imagined. More than anything, he wanted to admit that he thought this might mean there was something special between the two of them, a thing that was more than coincidence—just meant to be.

And he didn’t say any of that.

“Do you have kids?”

Dagwood looked up at that question and laughed. “Uh, no.”

Not like I haven’t had a chance to try.

He couldn’t count on one hand the number of women—and men—who had approached him to offer something he could never accept. There was really no reason that he shouldn’t have accepted, but the truth was that he just couldn’t forget about the face in the well, the alabaster skin and the blazing hair. No stranger to sex, his heart nevertheless belonged to someone else whom he was prepared to wait an eternity for.

“But you said when your generation started having kids. And then you said ‘we.’”

“Just a manner of speaking.” Dagwood waved his hand a little, dismissing the notion. “I’m a lone wolf.”

“No pack?”

“Never really needed one. I move around too much anyway.”

Not to mention that he had been kicked out of his own home shortly after he got into the bounty hunter business, because his affairs with the humans made the other wolves nervous. A shifter couldn’t avoid being around humans, but he usually didn’t let those humans know what he actually was. If the people he worked for knew that he was a wolf, the others in his pack could only see this as a risk to their own identities.

He didn’t blame them, not one bit. Life was too short to play that game. Besides, it all turned out pretty well compared to how it could have gone. It happened when he came home after receiving his share of the award placed on the wayward convict’s head. The money was burning a hole in his pocket, just begging to be spent.

Arriving home, he found his packleader and landlord waiting for him. He was given a week to leave and that was being generous, considering how frantic and worried the pack was about their livelihood. The award money went to good use, paying six months up-front for a new apartment on the other side of the city. During that time, he worked a number of other odd jobs all involving his strength and physical stature, and chased down five other suspects.

No, money hadn’t ever been a problem.

Dagwood resurfaced from his memories to find Irwin eyeing his pizza again, which was still mostly uneaten. Cold and congealing now, it looked absolutely unappetizing to him.

“Here,” he said, nudging the pan towards Irwin. “Seems like you need it way more than I do, huh?”

But Irwin just shook his head. “No. Thanks, but, uh, no. You’re really cool and all, Dagwood, and this has been nice, but I think we might be done here. I need to go home and start filling these out. It’d be kind of shitty to come all the way out here and spend all my time doing this, only for all the jobs to go because I was delayed by some weirdo.”

“Well,” Dagwood said, “this weirdo has really enjoyed his time delaying you.”

Irwin smiled. It hung crooked but genuine on his lips. “I guess it was an okay way to get out of the heat. Do you think that waitress will ever come back or should we steal the pan the pizza comes in?”

As if on cue, the waitress reappeared, snapping her gum. “That waitress has a name, thanks.”

Dagwood looked at her and narrowed his eyes. “But you never told us, so how would we know?”

She ignored him and started to drift away again, without seeing what they had wanted. In his experience, being ignored usually meant he’d struck a chord and the other person had no comeback.

“Would you bring us a to-go box for this?” he called after her.

She didn’t answer. By this time, there was only one other customer in the entire pizzeria and they seemed to have fallen asleep in their meatball salad. Nevertheless, she took five minutes to get back to them. Dagwood timed her.

Accepting his box, Irwin said, “Can I see the bite marks in your gum?”

The look she gave him was one that a person might wear if they had just seen a cockroach run over their foot. Dagwood bit his tongue while Irwin nonchalantly stacked pizza slices in the Styrofoam box. He dropped a few bills on top of the table, enough for the food and a generous tip—which she didn’t deserve—and followed Irwin outside.

The moment they were back in the heat, Irwin started to laugh. “Fuck, did you see the look she gave me?”

Dagwood laughed as well, because he had, because it was funny, and because seeing Irwin so delighted did strange and pleasant things to his insides. Leaning against the wall of the restaurant, they laughed and the two sounds, one deep and the other high, blurred together into a dizzying melody that blocked out the rest of the world.

I think I can be okay with this, Dagwood thought. The laughter was fading as the rest of the world filtered back in around him. Heat on his face, car horns blaring in the distance. I met him. I know what he’s like. I survived a decade only imagining him, and I can live the rest of my life knowing he’s real.

Irwin looked at him and said, “You know, you really are cool.”

And Dagwood leaned in and kissed him.

He hadn’t even known that he was going to do it until he was being pushed away, a small hand pressing on his chest. If he’d needed a reminder that omega wolves could be powerful when under duress, this would be it. His ribs felt strained, and he placed his hand over the sore spot, rubbing it.

His lips tingled with want, but the kiss hadn’t ever fallen. He’d contacted only air, only the oily heat of breath, before being pushed back.

Irwin looked at him. Sadness glazed his eyes and even his hair seemed to have gone dull, but he just shook his head. “No. Thanks. I’m flattered, but no.”

Dagwood nodded. “Sorry.” More than just sunlight warmed his cheeks now and he looked away. His eyes felt hot, too.

“It’s okay. I don’t blame you. I am kind of hot.” Irwin smiled and laughed, but he seemed understandably tense. “But just…no. Not now. I should go. See you around, maybe. Thanks for lunch.”

Not now. If not now, when?

“Sure,” Dagwood said.

See you in my dreams.

And he watched Irwin walk away.